ArtFutura reaches its seventeenth edition. From 26 to 29 October, the festival that has become a point of reference in Spain for art, technology and digital culture will offer an extensive program of activities in museums and cultural centers in as many as ten different cities.

Once again, ArtFutura is basing its nerve center in Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona, where presentations and conferences, workshops and project exhibitions will take place along with simultaneous viewings of its wide-ranging program of projections and parallel activities in nine other capitals.

ArtFutura 2006 will present the most outstanding and innovative projects that have been undertaken over the last twelve months on the international scene of digital art, interactive design, computer animation and video games.

At a time in which, following a boom in social technologies such as blogs and new paradigms such as the “Web 2.0”, Internet users are generating and canalizing greater volumes of information in different ways, artists, designers and technologists are becoming interested in designing new forms of representing and visualizing the constant movement of data that surrounds us.

Among the international guests who will be participating in the festival, those that stand out are: the German architectural studio Realities:United, specialists in the creation of “media façades” such as SPOTS or BLIX, large-scale architectural interventions that transform entire buildings into enormous data screens; Andrew Vande Moere, editor of Information Aesthetics, the Internet reference weblog for data aesthetics; or the prominent collective of designers United Visual Artists (UVA). Known, above all, for their light and data shows for large groups such as Massive Attack or U2, on their recent tour, UVA have created installations, videos and designs for spaces in which they investigate how the language of illumination can be evolved through software.

As part of Estación Futura -- the festival’s night program in the Espacio Movistar at the Forum – and for the first time in Spain, UVA will present their audiovisual show, in which they use large-scale “LED” screens and all sorts of data to execute a performance of unprecedented intensity, live in ArtFutura.

This year, ArtFutura’s digital animationsection presents large-scale productions that re-evaluate and redefine the limits between 3D, the real image, and traditional animation techniques. The legendary studios of animation in plasticine Aardman are to visit the festival for the first time to talk about “Flushed Away”, their first production undertaken completely by computer, and Attitude Studios from France will present “Renaissance”, Europe’s most personal and ambitious digital animation production to date.

In addition to all of this, the other outstanding feature of the festival in this area will be the much acclaimed “A Scanner Darkly”, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, in which the creator Richard Linklater raises the sophistication of the rotoscope technique to new levels and in which he films real actors and later transforms them into animations by means of digital techniques. The British firm of visual effects and digital animation Framestore, currently Europe’s most important company in this area, will also be present in ArtFutura on Saturday afternoon.

Once again, ArtFutura’s last afternoon will bring together important personalities from the world of videogames by uniting digital artists who approach this area with an intention of renewing its language and aesthetics.

In the year in which the industry, once again, confronts a profound technological transformation with the appearance of a new generation of consoles, the festival invites leading figures from the industry, such as Ted Price (Insomniac Games), who will speculate on the changes to come.

ArtFutura will also present the work of designers who are in the forefront when it comes to proposing alternative ways of playing, Masaya Matsuura for example, author of musical titles such as “Vib Ribbon”, “Mojib Ribbon” or “Parappa”, accompanied by artists such as the iconoclastic Ryota Kuwakubo who, in his recreational projects, deconstructs all of the conventions of the language of classical games in order to create toys of a surprising interaction.

And, as in previous years, ArtFutura 2006 will analyze the present state of digital creativity in our country in all fields (Interactiva, 3D in Spain and Visual Effects in Spain, Games in Spain) and it will present its international selection of 3D animation (ArtFutura Show), videogame intros (Full Motion Theater), the awardsfor digital animation 3D in Spain Movistar ArtFutura and for PlayStation ArtFutura Videogame Design as well as an advance on the edition 2006 of RESFEST.